| On the Appeal to Intuitions in Ethics Peter Singer Excerpted from Dale Jamieson (ed.), Singer and His Critics , Oxford, 1999, pp. 316-318 Even though it has always seemed to me so evidently erroneous, the view that we must test our normative theories against our intuitions has continued to have many adherents [...]. But now it faces its most serious challenge yet, in the form of Peter Unger's Living High and Letting Die In most versions of the trolley problem, the agent has only two options: to pull the switch or not pull the switch, to push the heavy person off the bridge or not to push. In one the agent is active, changing what would happen if he or she were not there, while in the other option, the agent does nothing. Unger introduces intermediate options, and shows that this affects the way people judge the extreme options. In other words, when presented with a choice between A and E (where A, for example, is doing nothing, and E is pushing the heavy person into the path of the trolley) people will say that E is the worse option. When presented with a choice between A, B, C, D and E (where B, C, D and E progressively save more lives by increasingly active forms of intervention) people will say that E ii the best option. The reason for this surprising result is that people see that B is better than A, C is better than B, D is better than C and E is better than D. Why should adding or deleting intermediate options affect our intuitive judgments of pre-existing options? A defender of our intuitions might argue that Unger's intermediate options are a means of corrupting sound moral intuitions, but we would need to know why that should be so When we look more closely at the options that people are inclined to reject, the picture looks quite different. The intuitive reactions are, Unger argues, based on factors much odder than not using a person as a means: | |
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